Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Change Vim’s Settings on the Fly

Vim has hundreds of options that let us customize its behavior (see option-listⓘ for the full list). We can use the :set command to change them.

Let’s take the ‘ignorecase’ setting as an example (as discussed in Tip 73). This is a boolean option: it can either be on or off. We can enable it by running this:

:set ignorecase

To turn this feature off, we prefix the name of the setting with the word “no”:

:set noignorecase

If we append a trailing bang symbol after a boolean option, we can toggle the setting:

:set ignorecase!

If we append a trailing question mark, we can find out what the option is currently set to:

:set ignorecase?
ignorecase

We can also append a trailing & symbol ...